If you’re just tuning in, my best friend Kelsey, and I are in the process of reading the ‘Books That Blooded Us’ with Fated Mates podcast hosts Jen and Sarah. We’re just doing their historical picks but you can find all the Old School deep reads in Season 2.
Book Club is back! After a length of time measurable by how many K-Dramas my fellow clubber has consumed, we are at last cracking the spine of another Old School romance.
This week, we’re both first-timers for the classic Indigo by Beverly Jenkins. The author is the queen of Black American Historicals, but neither of us read non-white romances back in the day.* Unlike Sarah McLean, I don’t remember ever seeing Jenkins’ books at my local library or Barnes & Noble growing up in Central Virginia. As an adult, I do read non-white historical set in my beloved 19th century Britain as well as lots of multicultural contemporaries written primarily by AOCs, but there’s a big gap in my formative romance education. Now that I’ve finally picked up my first Beverly Jenkins, I know I missed out on a lot.
The story of the feisty homebody Hester and the globetrotting rake Galen, Indigo takes all the crazy Old School historical tropes we love and sets them in a new environment, an African American community in Michigan on the eve of the Civil War. From the jump, we get that the stakes are stratospheric. Think our white Regency MCs with their childhood abuse and neglect had tragic backstories? Our heroine’s father sold himself into slavery for love and it was only after a decade of secret searching that his relatives found the child Hester and brought her to Michigan. Holy shit. Of course this woman is afraid to fall in love! But Hester’s not afraid of anything else. When we meet Hester she’s hiding a severely injured but still undeniably handsome man in her cellar – so far, so romance – but this is all in a day’s work for this badass heroine who works as a conductor in the Underground Railroad. A fugitive isn’t going to upend her world. But when Galen returns as a rich playboy? Different story.
‘I was frankly surprised by the amount of sex in this book’ says Kel. Yeah, well, the guy’s bought Hester a dozen nightgowns and he’s keen to see her in all of them. That’s right, once our hero get’s back in town, Galen definitely pays Hester back for all the sacrifices she made while nursing him – even going without food so he’d have enough – and the story has a bit of a grown-up Little Princess vibe. Our hero is also delightfully unselfish in the sack, getting Hester off several occasions, including once in his fancy carriage, before ever having his own orgasm. Things stay sexy once the couple are married thanks to their mistress/wife play which brilliantly ‘gives her more freedom to express herself sexually’. Despite the socio-economic differences, there’s total power parity between these two because they’re both doing the same dangerous work. So we have Old School Romance that’s incredibly feminist while taking on racism at its most deadly. Nice.
What else does Bev Jenkins do well? Um, everything? Cause she has to. Even those of us who want to rip up the ultra white and privileged historicals script handed down by Georgette Heyer et all (me! me!) are still working against a foil. There is a shared understanding of what these romances look like that forms a crucial backdrop even when authors are working against script. But writing Black American Historical romance in the 1990s? Jenkins had to worldbuild like a Fantasy author but without any of the flexibility. And with the knowledge that many readers would interrogate whether Hester’s world really existed.
Indigo made us hyper aware of the default descriptions of women’s bodies in Old School Romances. We knew that every heroine we read in our youth was white, young, and slim. But when you read a female lead who defies that triumvirate, you really notice just how identical is the language used to describe OS heroines. Fine, they were allowed to change their hair colour, provided it was long and lustrous, and eye colour, provided their eyelashes were long and dark. But from the neck down? Identical. I think I must have read ‘rosebud nipples’ and ‘flawless porcelain skin’ so many times that I didn’t even register them consciously. They were part of the scenery of Ye Olden Times as surely as petticoats and pantaloons.
Some of the tropes in Indigo were wonderfully Old School. Galen’s decision to express his feelings by upholstering his carriage in Indigo velvet? Classic ostentatious alpha male move of which James Malory would be proud. Although that allegedly Gentle Rogue owned a West Indian plantation, soooo moving on…. The Fated Mates praised this book for not making the woman the hero’s supposed to marry a complete bitch, but frankly we get plenty of Evil Other Woman vibes from Hester’s ex-fiancée’s wife who negs Hester hard and is a bit slut-shamed into the bargain. Whatever. Hester’s emotional arc was super satisfying and, like Jen and Sarah, we loveloveloved how her experience was front and centre over Galen’s even when she’s sitting at home and he’s off on daring rescue missions in the South. She’s a grownup who knows plenty about the world which is an awesome twist on the classic worldly-rake-meets-wallflower romance.
‘I’m glad you made me read it!’ says Kelsey. Yessss. I only wish someone had made me read it twenty years ago.
Next week: Lorraine Health get’s all Romance taboo with a heroine who’s married. And not to the hero…
*Unless you include those Native American trackers our East Coast heiresses were invariably abducted by when they went West. Or those Middle Eastern sheiks our English heiresses were invariably abducted by when they went to Italy. I don’t want to even go there. Often they turned out to be white dudes anyway.
